20th Anniversary Special Issue: Art of the Future: The Future of Art || Curators, Creators and Consumers

Leonardo

Curators, Creators and ConsumersAuthor(s): Peter Lloyd JonesSource: Leonardo, Vol. 20, No. 4, 20th Anniversary Special Issue: Art of the Future: TheFuture of Art (1987), pp. 353-360Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578531 .

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Curators, Creators and Consumers

Peter Lloyd Jones

Abstract-The author discusses the way in which the reward-systems for the professions of art and architecture influence practitioners' perceptions of their respective roles. Status is considered to be an important factor in this relationship. Following the ideas of Thorstein Veblen on the so-called 'trickle effect', the role of status in determining the perceptions of consumers of art and architecture is considered. Consumers are little interested in the issues, invariably formal and abstract, that concern professionals. Artists and architects are urged to address themselves to these realities and engage in a genuine attempt to create for the marketplace if they wish to influence the character of the environment.

I. UTILITY AND DECENCY

In July 1986, a major conference on the topic of Art and Architecture [1] took place at the Royal Institute of British Architects. It focussed on two issues: the need for a campaign to further the cause of new legislation in the United Kingdom (the 'X%' law) that would require that a certain percentage of construction costs of new buildings be devoted to art, and the need to reform education so that the separation between artists and architects-which begins at college-could be lessened. Sadly, the conference was long on worthy sentiment but short on practical ideas, and it was left to Francis Morrell, socialist Chairperson of the Inner London Educational Authority (ILEA) [2], to focus on the real issues and to touch, albeit inadvertently, some raw artistic nerves.

She prefaced her remarks by giving assurances that the support of the ILEA could be taken for granted in imple- menting any 'X%' law; however, she then warned that politicians, as the elected representatives of the people, would never again be prepared to give professionals a blank cheque-especially when those professionals were artists and architects. She cited mass housing in inner cities as a horrendous example of the way in which the people's tribunes could be misled by zealous and mistaken professionals; this would never be allowed to happen again. Nevertheless, she saw the present-day ILEA as carrying on the tradition of the old nineteenth-century London School

Peter Lloyd Jones (artist, designer, teacher), Kingston Polytechnic, School of Three-Dimensional Design, Knights Park Centre, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2QJ, U.K.

Abridged version of a paper presented to the Art and Architecture Society at the Institute of Contem- porary Arts, London.

Received 25 July 1986.

Board in wanting the 'school' to be an example in the community, a visible expression of the higher values of society, an assertion of at least a modest generosity of spirit in the face of the universal meanness of the surrounding streets. Like her predecessors, she believed that school buildings should enhance their neighbourhood and not disfigure it. Quoting an old School Board report, she noted its observation that "the difference between the properly decent and basically utilitarian was less than 5%".

This contrast between the 'basically utilitarian' and the 'properly decent', which the old School Board felt so important, preoccupied many nineteenth- century reformers and philanthropists who, though appalled at the squalor in which the poor were forced to live, were anxious lest any superfluity of expense be used for hedonism or extravagance that would give the lower orders ideas above their station. In making the distinction in this way, they were alluding unconsciously to the indecent opulence all too evident among members of the bourgeoisie suddenly enriched by manufacture or speculation. Clearly, it was both im- practical and improper to set this as an example to the poor. But who was to decide what should be considered an appropriate amount of excess expenditure over and above the basic and utilitarian? And what was to count as a suitable and proper enhancement, an enhancement that would set the poor a good example of right living but would not give them dangerous aspirations?

Matthew Arnold [3] was the first to pronounce publicly on these sensitive matters by asserting the right of the concerned intelligentsia to stand outside of all social groups and to criticise their values in light of what he saw as 'higher' values-so-called 'sweetness and light'. Here, for almost the first time, we are

listening to the voice of the professional bureaucrat. And if Arnold seems an isolated crackpot, one need only consider Ruskin, Henry Cole (Dickens's 'Govern- ment Inspector') and many another confident Victorian who rode the tide of educational reform that led to the Great Exhibition, the museums, the Schools of Design and, ironically, some decades later to the first system of primary education which spawned the London School Board.

I shall call all such figures 'curators', since what they are asserting is their right to act as custodians-in this case, custodians of social values. In using the word in this way, I am borrowing a term coined by the sociologist Erving Goffman, who first wrote about the activities of such groups in the 1950s [4]. I shall come back to the role of the professional cultural bureaucrat later.

For the moment, I want to concentrate on that magic 'X%'-the difference between the basic and utilitarian and the properly dignified. The trouble, of course, with formulating a reformist programme in this way is that everyone thinks that the particular X% that he or she allocates to activities beyond the basic necessities is the right amount and the way in which he or she decides to spend it entirely proper. At the limit, not even the most fantastic extravagances of the Victorian rich (where X = 99.9%) were considered in any way improper by those who indulged in them. This universal perception of normality in the disposal of the X%-even when, as so often, X reached grotesque proportions-was a topic that occupied the attention of an as-yet-unknown American academic who was writing at the same time as the London School Board was pondering these matters. I refer to Thorstein Veblen whose influential book The Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1898 [5].

@ 1987 ISAST Pergamon Journals Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/87 $3.00+0,00

LEONARDO, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 353-360, 1987



I

Fig. 1. Art exhibited on the railings of St. James Park, London. Each weekend small fortunes are made ... but never any reputations.

Fig. 2. A 'recognized' gallery. Reputations can be made here but large financial rewards are rare ... and the public at large is conspicuous by its

absence.

II. THE TRICKLE EFFECT AND THE CIRCULATION OF SYMBOLS

Veblen's field was economics and in particular the operations of the financial system in relation to the needs of industry. His economics were of a very practical kind, and his work was neither mathematical nor in the least abstract. One of his editors, C. Wright Mills, said that Veblen's whole life was an attempt to understand the curious and often bizarre relationships between the institutions that made things (an activity Veblen held to be self-evidently important) and the institutions that made money (an activity that he very firmly did not). He himself was almost exaggeratedly frugal, making his own furniture from old packing cases and living in the cellar of a friend's house when on hard times.

His explanation of the cruel and fantastic operations of the social system that brought riches to the few and poverty to the many-even in a land of plenty- put the emphasis not on money but on status. His account, both savage and funny, posited that the mainspring of the industrial system was not what everyone supposed to be obvious-the production

of necessities, the 'basically utilitarian'- on the contrary, it was precisely that magic 'X%', 'the properly decent' or what Veblen called more succinctly 'waste'. In Veblen's view, what counted above all in

society was status. And demonstrable ability to waste was directly expressive of status: the greater one's ability to waste, the higher one's status.

Veblen's theory has at its base a

peculiarly personal version of social evolutionism. Modern social life began, according to Veblen, with a primal conflict in which marauding horsemen

swept into settled agrarian communities, subjugating the farmers into slavery and

plundering their goods. From this first clash came the aversion of both parties to work. Work under these conditions was, mere toil, and toil was the lot of the slave and hence to be despised as undignified. So it was with possessions. Possessions were in the nature of booty or plunder. But with the advent of more peaceable times, warfare was no longer available as a means of honorific exploit. Plunder therefore came to be in short supply. So the honorific character of goods had perforce to be incorporated in some other

way. However, the essence of booty lies in its factitiousness and its uselessness. (The expropriation of the merely useful is the reverse of honorific, since it argues that the plunderers themselves have need of its office.) Therefore honorific goods, once these are manufactured and not merely expropriated, have to incorporate the maximum of uselessness in as obvious a way as possible in order to avoid the imputation of mere necessity. This is the theory of conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption serves the purpose of maintaining one's distinction from the masses, an assertion of superiority that Veblen called 'an invidious pecuniary comparison'. He called the aesthetic and moral standards which derive from this perception 'pecuniary standards of decency'.

The trouble with this arrangement in modern societies is that everyone desires a pecuniary standard of decency. This is easy for contemporary members of the upper class whose jobs are confined to the display of embodied idleness or waste in as conspicuous a way as possible. (That is why Veblen called them the 'leisure class'.) In modern industrial societies,

Lloyd Jones, Curators, Creators, Consumers 354



however, the universal availability of cheap artefacts of every kind means that the decencies of the leisure class can be imitated by anyone. All that is needed is the money to purchase, if not exactly the real thing, then at least a fair imitation of suitably honorific goods. Naturally, members of the leisure class try to re- establish an invidious comparison by adopting new symbols of exclusiveness in their purchases of honorific goods. Meanwhile, below the first layer of imitators is a second layer imitating them, and so on. Thus the status symbols proper to the leisure class are said to 'trickle down' the social hierarchy. This is the so-called 'trickle' or 'Veblen' effect.

It was left to another American economist, Dusenberry, to develop Veblen's insight that utility was in essence a social matter [6]. Dusenberry took up Veblen's basic position but stripped it of its moral indictment. He was able to put Veblen's ideas of emulation and imitation into a neutral, technical form based around what he called the 'demonstration effect'. His argument admitted the reality of all the strange activities Veblen had described; however, it focussed attention not on their behavioral aspects but on the

implications for the way in which goods themselves are perceived.

Dusenberry accepted as fact that, for whatever reasons, all goods can be ranked into hierarchies of desirability within each particular kind. The assump- tion of economic rationality merely amounts to the claim that people know what these rankings are and would prefer to consume goods from as high up a particular rank as possible. What prevents people from constantly bankrupting themselves in attempting to move up these hierarchies are psychological restraints acquired through training and habit. And what breaks these restraints down on occasion is the sight of other people's indulgences. This is what Dusenberry called the 'demonstration effect' which, in his account, is entirely free from pejorative overtones. Once the demonstration effect is in operation, the probability that an individual's barriers to a higher level of consumption would be broken depends on one's chances of knowing about the consumption behavior of others as well as on their behavior itself.

Veblen's legacy was most notably taken up in the 1950s by the sociologist

Lloyd Fallers who pointed to the crucial role of the Veblen effect in motivating and stabilising competitive industrial societies [7]. For its success, a society of this kind depends on its ability to motivate its members into a life of unremitting toil in the processes of production. This is done by constantly praising the value of 'effort' above all other values. ("If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again!") So pervasive is the injunction to strive for success that such societies are sometimes called 'effortocratic'.

This approach, however, has a fundamental flaw. Because the institutions of such societies are invariably hierarchical and, moreover, ones in which the hierarchies are pyramidal, the chances of actually achieving the success that is constantly promised as the reward for striving are usually vanishingly small. While there are indeed much-publicised examples of individuals who have risen through the ranks to become presidents of corporations or whatever, the number of such individuals is statistically quite insignificant. So how do effortocratic societies persuade people to pit their lives in a race in which the chances of winning

Fig. 3. Modern formalist art looks best in a large empty space.




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Fig. 4. In the ordinary consumer environment modern formalist art looks out of place and incoherent.

are so low? In part, the strategy is to divert attention onto the size of the prize. If this is mesmerisingly large, then the infinitesimal chances of gaining it are forgotten. More important, though, is the part played by the operation of the Veblen effect. It operates in two ways which I call the 'cushion' and the 'gearing' effects. Fallers pointed out that what was important for most people was not the achievement of some ultimate goal but the sense of making headway, that things were getting better, over some reasonable period of time. And here the consumption of symbolic status embodied in honorific goods enabled everyone to have the illusion of having made a gain in status even when in reality it may have remained unchanged or even declined.

The trickle effect is the 'cushioning' agent which enables someone who has achieved no absolute gain in status to declare, "See, things are not so bad. I am not a failure for I am now able to consume goods that in an earlier time would have only been available to someone from a higher station of life." On the other hand, the descending flow of status-symbolic goods enables the successful strivers, those who have

actually achieved some real gains, to enjoy, through the operation of the gearing effect, the illusion that their success is greater than it in fact is. In effect, the enormous productivity of modern industry has enabled what Veblen called 'waste' to be democratised. Everyone can share it, or at least a little bit of it.

The most precious symbols of the higher ranks of society are endlessly recycled in the so-called kitsch (or 'low- brow' goods of poor quality) consumed by the lower ranks. This is as true in their architecture as it is of their consumption goods. There are, of course, some fundamental problems with this system. Not the least is the fact that it depends on society's ability to deliver a continuously expanding supply of new status-symbolic goods and ever-increasing real incomes to purchase them. When this state of affairs breaks down, trouble rapidly ensues. For the most part, though, most of the people, most of the time, are happy. And the communist part of the world seems as happy as the rest.

In all societies, however, there is one

group that remains unsatisfied by these arrangements. This is the group that is professionally concerned with symbols

and values-the 'curators' and 'creators' of my title-for the operation of the trickle effect is based on the downward diffusion of the symbols of the leisure class. By their very nature, these are the symbols of the time-honoured and the traditional, through which the aristocracy is aped by the nouveau riche. They have little or nothing to do with the interests of most innovators-especially when those innovators are organised in professional social groups which serve to foster quite other values. The sad truth that the majority of society at all levels is indifferent to the concerns of the curators and creators is rarely admitted but clear enough to anyone who has had to sell any kind of cultural product for a living. Thus artists and architects are in a paradoxical position. On one hand, their whole livelihood depends on the continuous production of ostensibly novel symbolic artefacts which fuel the trickle effect; on the other hand, that same process is deeply inimical to any real novelty or creative invention at any level likely to interest the professionals. After all, if the market were demanding 'art' with its 'architecture', there would be no need for a Society to promote the liaison.

Predictably, the reaction of the curators




to this indifference is often uncharitable, to say the least. An example may serve to illustrate the chasm that separates the parties. Some years ago there was a sculptural happening in a New York gallery. Two roomsets-one a bedroom, the other a living room-were created out of what was no doubt called kitsch. In fact, they were like countless millions of similar rooms in any city or village in any country in the industrialised world, homely but not in any way aesthetic-at least as curators would understand that term. When the audience of culturati was assembled, the sculptor Arman entered and, seizing the axes and the sledge- hammer provided, began to destroy the offending artefacts until everything was smashed to pieces. Called Conscious Vandalism, the show was a calculated affront of the most aggressive kind to the values held by the majority of home- owning families throughout the modern world. Given this kind of response to their values, it is not surprising that those who are forced to dwell 'downmarket' remain hostile to those who promulgate such 'modern' art. Surely, it is tensions of this kind that lay behind the politically menacing assertions of Francis Morrell. What continues to smolder is not a class war but a status war, and this kind of war is far more difficult to end.

III. STATUS AND THE IDEOLOGY OF THE CREATOR PROFESSIONS

This same awareness of social status lies behind the absence of so many architects from art conferences. Oscar Wilde said that "all art is useless". One might strengthen this assertion from a Veblenesque point of view and say that "only art is useless". Certainly, art embodies uselessness in its purest form. In art, the X% is actually 100%. This being so, it is thus art that attracts the highest status. To be 'recognised', i.e. endorsed in one's claims to be an artist, is the abiding aim of all would-be creators. In consequence, there is a universal tendency for all the useful arts to turn into the useless or 'fine' arts-and architecture is no exception. Architecture is seen by its most illustrious practitioners as an art form in its own right, one that is in no need of enhancement by so-called 'artists' of whatever kind. Indeed, for some architects, to be seen at art conferences would be admitting a dangerous in- security that could be professionally damaging.

These imperatives are socialised into would-be creators from their earliest student days and are reinforced constantly by warnings about life in a tough

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competitive professional hierarchy. Students learn about these hierarchies early on. Take a simple example: where one should exhibit one's work. In London one could start by hanging it on the railings of St. James Park (Fig. 1). Considerable sums are made here every week. However, everyone knows that if one aspired to any serious recognition, this would not be a wise move-even if one were desperate for the money-for venues like this are not 'rated'. To be seen here would be to court the risk of permanent stigma, the imputation of not being considered 'serious'. Just a small cut above the railings are the various art and craft 'markets'. Again, the right merchandise will sell for substantial amounts, and many artists live happily with locations like these as their only outlets. Even within the markets there are hierarchies of desirability, with those on the tourist routes in restored environ- mental areas, such as Covent Garden, preferred. A serious creator-especially one who aspired eventually to become a curator or cultural pundit-would shun such milieus however much the money might be needed. Only a recognised gallery will do (Fig. 2).

There is a similar hierarchy of architects' practices, one equally known to students. Magazines such as the Architects' Journal publish occasional 'league tables' in which the popularity of practices is ranked on how many students have chosen a particular one in which to spend their year of professional practice. These rankings have nothing to do with the relative affluence of a firm. Many wealthy practices would never make the

Top 20. Conversely, many well-known and highly sought-after firms are quite modestly endowed. Inevitably, the more highly it is sought after as a potential employer, the more meagre the wages that a practice can afford to pay its aspiring junior staff.

The status of any servant-artist or architect-is related to the status of the master or, as one should more properly say in speaking of the modern professional relationship, of the client. Service to a Duke is more highly regarded than the same office to a mere Count. This is true whether this service is significant or not. It applies equally whether one is court painter or court barber. To this day, artists and architects must strive for patronage from an aristocratic elite who can confer status by their mere acquaintance.

Beyond this literal aristocracy lie the higher echelons of the powerful and the rich, whether these are individuals or, more commonly today, the big corporations. Thus, to count IBM among one's clients is more prestigious than merely working for the corner betting shop. The difference is not only one of scale and wealth, for the status of IBM depends in turn on the status of its clients-the consumers of its products and services. The computer user is presumed to be of higher status than the common gambler.

As has often been noted, as soon as any activity becomes professionalised, the servants start to assert their status over their ostensible masters. They do this by the aggressive manifestation of their esoteric expertise. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this behavior in


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our own culture is Vasari's story (told in "The Life of Cosimo Rosselli" [8]) of the inferior cultural status of the Pope himself. According to Vasari, while the Pope was indeed the ultimate spiritual authority, he was ignorant of true aesthetic standards: clearly seduced by Cosimo's banal extravagances of gold and ultramarine, in preference to the subtle formal qualities of Cosimo's rivals, he awarded Cosimo a commission for a wall decoration in the Sistine Chapel. Here, as so often since, the values of those 'in the know' are asserted as superior to those of the ignorant, even if the latter are of higher status in other regards; the uninformed, those who are not quite 'with it', are classed as the benighted and despised accordingly. To this day, 'good' clients are those who defer to the artist's own values, and a 'free hand' is universally prized.

In praising the supposedly superior merits of the formal abstract qualities of works of art and disparaging as 'obvious' and 'showy' such features as the surface glitter of gold and ultramarine, Vasari

was referring to a set of values that appears to be universally prized among curator groups in all cultures. This is the tendency to attach high status to the restrained rather than to the indulgent. Erving Goffman has referred to this as 'negative cultivation' [9]. In all cultures, high status attaches to certain kinds of expertise or prowess when carried to extreme lengths. Applied to cultural matters among curator groups, this often leads to the ascription of high status onto the ability to divert attention away from the obviously salient qualities in perception and to focus instead on the marginal and the oblique. This ability to control perception in a particular way is a skill that is achieved through prolonged training, usually as part of the apprentice- ship in a particular culture. Ability to focus on minutiae, for example, is part of the prolonged (if usually tacit) socialization into 'professional' understandings which takes place during the education of both artists and architects.

Goffman drew an example from an earlier period, in this case from Japan. In

the Zen tea ceremony, the elimination of all extraneous symbolism and the severe attenuation of form and texture in the visual environment enabled those 'in the know' to focus concentrated attention on the tiniest details of the glaze on the surface of the teacups. Without this concentrated withdrawal of attention, such details would otherwise be overlooked. Negative cultivation enables one to see aspects of one's world that are overlooked in everyday life and plays a crucial role in enabling one to grasp the special qualities of works of art.

However, in some cultures negative cultivation is taken to extremes, and the consequent austerities cut off the majority from an understanding of the very nature of art. The twentieth century is one such period. Whether it derives from the Platonic primary geometry of De Stijl, Le Corbusier's romantic love of the austerities of Mediterranean peasant building or the mechanistic minimalism of Mies van der Rohe, the abiding concern is with a ruthless economy, leading to the progressive attenuation of

Fig. 6. Almost any nineteenth-century building reveals an effortless Fig. 7. Detail of a decorative corbel from the rear elevation of Ulster conversation between artist and architect. Terrace, one of the Nash Terraces in London's Regents Park.

Lloyd Jones, Curators, Creators, Consumers

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358



form and the elimination of 'extraneous' content.

Needless to say, the perceptual training needed to appreciate this highly refined style of art and architecture is long and arduous. So it is not surprising that the majority of the population who have not undergone this training have not only no sympathy with it, but even no awareness of it at all. The uneducated majority can truthfully say that they "can't see anything in it". What they mean is not that they are blind but that their attention is directed elsewhere, their interests focussed on quite other matters, matters which demand a much more diverse and undifferentiated perceptual stance.

Naturally enough, professional groups share a common interest in technical matters, on how things are done. In creator groups, these interests concern questions of form and composition as well as subject matter and narrative. Since the latter are highly variable and personal, it is precisely the more subtle questions of form and technique that constitute the permanent concerns of artists and creator groups in general.

Herbert Gans, in his book Popular Culture and High Culture, has clearly delineated this contrast in the case of fiction, primarily the novel but also in more recent genres such as the cinema [10]. He noted that the professionals in those fields are interested in character, psychological complexity and formal construction, whereas the consumers of fiction are interested primarily in explicit action, strength of plot and the vivid depiction of scene.

In the visual arts, this contrast is manifest in the opposition between the layperson's concerns with the concrete, with explicit and recognisable imagery, and the high value that professionals put upon 'abstraction'. Abstraction is precisely the kind of art and architecture in which all extraneous imagery is stripped away, thus forcing attention onto structure and composition-the mental architecture of the work-because there is nothing else left to look at. Put these two themes, formalism and negative cultivation, together in the competitive structures of a mature professional bureaucracy and one has the perfect recipe for that alienation between creators and consumers which is a feature of all industrial societies.

There is a further factor that is of great importance in the development of artistic formalism. Right from the beginning, all professions start to develop institutions for critical commentary and theoretical speculation. These grow in schools and colleges, in learned journals and secular

publishing, in conferences and meetings, even in public lectures-indeed, wherever ideas are worked out and doctrine is expounded. And, of course, theoreticians are like everyone else, subject to intense professional competition. Under such pressures, extreme or 'fundamentalist' versions of theoretical positions emerge quite naturally. Those who hold such positions are derided as 'ivory tower' by those who live in the marketplace. In turn, the latter appear to the theoreticians as having 'sold out'. Thus the 'commercial' seems to them a watered-down or diluted version of the 'real thing'.

Not infrequently, advocates of such extreme 'creative' attitudes capture important positions as curators. When Goffman introduced this term-a meta- phorical extrapolation from the real museum curator-he meant it to refer to all those who are professional custodians of social values. If the museum curator looks after the artefacts that express the values of society, the metaphoric curator looks after the symbols themselves. In most countries there is a significant overlap between the membership of 'the great and the good' (as the curator 'establishment' is sometimes called) and that of the traditional elites of the aristocratic and the wealthy. The force of Goffman's metaphor can be seen in the ease with which real-life curators, such as museum directors, slide over into be- coming cultural pundits who feel free to pontificate on the values of society at large, often earning supplementary salaries as media personalities in the process. In this sense, creators are part of the curator group, but the two are not coincident; indeed, they are often in conflict, as any history of nineteenth- century art will tell. For much of that time there was an almost continuous struggle between 'progressive' artists and a 'reactionary' cultural bureaucracy- especially in France. Much the same is true in this century in countries that are able to exert centralised control over artistic matters, such as the Soviet Union.

How does one join the ranks of the curators? For those born into the leisure class, it is an easy matter of acquiring a suitable perch in some museum officialdom or on the editorial board of a cultural paper or magazine. Creators who aspire to curatorship or 'punditry' have a more difficult task. There are two more or less mutually exclusive routes. The first entails a fanatical devotion to professional politics in the bureaucracy of the art form concerned-the ability to devote time to meetings of interminable tedium being a prime requisite. The second, which is even more demanding and, in con-

sequence, much more rare, entails winning the acclaim of fellow creators by virtue of a particularly potent version of some style of art or architecture that embodies a current esthetic issue.

Whether one's work is popular, like Richard Rogers' Pompidou Centre in Paris, or virtually unknown except to cognoscenti, such as the Guild House of Robert Venturi in Philadelphia [11], it has to be 'rated' by fellow professionals. Once one's work achieves recognition by virtue of the circulation of favorable critical comment in professional journals and the like, then one will soon be consulted by official bodies and invited to serve on juries and selection committees. Eventually one will be invited to join members of the leisure class in one of the establishment organizations such as the Royal Academy and thereby enabled to set the creative agenda for the practice of art at large in that particular field.

Given these harsh, if little discussed, social realities it is not surprising that curators, creators and consumers have such different visions of what 'proper' art and architecture should be, and even less so that there is no coherent view of what the proper relationship between them should be. In the real world, the best that can be hoped for is, it seems, an unobtrusive placing of some contemporary painting or sculpture as an add-on to a more or less neutral piece of modern building. This seems to be most reliably successful when the work of art has plenty of empty space around it (Fig. 3), such as in some wide piazza or grand foyer. When contemporary art is placed in the ordinary consumer environment of the city street, it is almost inevitably out of place and incoherent (Fig. 4). Where there is an attempt to incorporate art into architecture, it is invariably superficial. Art is on the building but not of it (Fig. 5). One has only to look at earlier buildings-buildings erected before there were separate and exclusive professional structures for architects and artists-to see how easy it all was. Almost any nineteenth-century building one might think of shows an effortless conversation between artists and architects. Most are still popular with their consumers as the many conservation lobbies testify.

Can anything be done to bridge this damaging cultural divide? The political experience of the twentieth century suggests that social structures are en- during entities and that social engineering, even when pursued with the utmost violence, is remarkably difficult. If, as I have argued, our alienated art and architecture are the inevitable outcomes of creative careers constrained within




professional social structures, each of which is in turn isolated from that descending flood of consumerism which drives the larger symbolic engine of society, then it is unrealistic to expect that 'X%' laws on their own will change much. Indeed, the much-quoted international

comparisons argue against such optimism. It is more plausible to believe that those countries that do have 'X%' laws are

precisely those that have less stratified societies-hence more unified cultures- and can therefore more easily enact the

necessary legislation. Those who wish to see more art in our environment-in however humble a way-had better work with the social structures that exist rather than struggle against them.

IV. A RECONCILIATION WITH REALITY

Let us start by recognising professional realities. Most established architects and

virtually all recognised artists are bound to ignore Art and Architecture. Those who claim exclusivity for what they do as art cannot afford to recognise the claims-or even the existence-of rival claimants. That is why the example of those rare few with claims that cannot be

gainsaid in both fields are precious. Feelings of professional exclusivity are

acquired early on during the first years of education. The processes of socialization into particular professional value systems are largely unconscious and little studied. Some research of socialization during education might help to identify pressure points where a little effort might attain much.

Secondly, as I have said, if it is

impossible for artists and architects to

change the structure of society, then it is

vitally important for them to work with the grain of society as it exists. This means that creators have to join in the circulation of images described as the Veblen effect. This in turn means that, instead of yearning for the occasional

public commission or 'blue-chip' client, artists and architects must get involved in the creation of marketed goods- including developer's architecture. Hitherto the speculative developer has been perceived as of low status by most architects, but I believe that it is of the

highest importance to get that X% of

consumption into developer's buildings. To begin with, barriers between the professions could well be weaker here since both artists and architects take their orders from the financiers. It is the scale of the potential change that is exciting though. If they could be persuaded that it would be cost-effective to include optional artistic embellishment as 'add-ons' to their new houses like their Victorian forefathers did, any one of our major developers could stimulate a Renaissance in domestic ornament. Once it got going, the trickle effect would take care of the rest. Why do we have to leave social

symbolism on our houses to the manu- facturers of plastic coach lamps and fibre-

glass repro porticos? Even when the client is willing, a

considerable imaginative effort is required in order to achieve even a tiny result in the

integration of art and architecture.

Having myself been through the wringer of abstraction and negative cultivation, I found it to be extraordinarily difficult to

design even the most modest decoration. In the early 1970s, however, I did have the

opportunity to design decorative corbels for the rear elevation to Ulster Terrace

[12] (Fig. 7 and Color Plate No. 4) one of the Nash Terraces in London's Regents Park. These were described at the time as "an obscure private joke in poor taste". Ulster Terrace has since been recognised as one of the first 'post-modern' buildings in London. Although it hardly qualifies as art and with hindsight seems painfully simple, the embellishment nevertheless does give the building a sparkle and a semantic complexity that it would have lacked without it.

So let us struggle to get the 'X%' laws enacted. They will do no harm and may do some good. Let us try to break down barriers between our students and foster catholic 'unprofessional' attitudes in our educational work. Let us use our

imaginations to the utmost even in the most modest schemes to recreate the

symbolic imagery that can really unite art and architecture. Finally, let us tackle the

marketplace head-on. If Veblen is right, we might even make some money. But if we do not succeed, then it is clear that the torrent of kitsch will continue to rise and that both artists and architects will be excluded from the symbolic affairs of

society. At the end of that road is the

lurking spectre of political control of the arts, which is why Francis Morrell's remarks made the alarm bells ring.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. "Art and Architecture" is the name of a society in the United Kingdom which is dedicated to fostering links between the two disciplines at all levels from initial training to collaboration on major architectural projects. The campaign for legislation in the U.K. that would require a fixed percentage of the building costs of new construction to be devoted to the provision of art is based on similar laws in effect in various European countries.

2. The Inner London Educational Authority is a directly elected body responsible for all the teaching in London, from infants' schools to the five major Polytechnics. As such it is the employer of all the teachers and the owner of all the school buildings. The current revenue budget is in excess of ?1,000,000,000. It is therefore a powerful force for constructive change in the area of art and architecture.

3. Matthew Arnold, "Culture and Anarchy", in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1962).

4. Erving Goffman, "Symbols of Class Status", British Journal of Sociology 2, 294-304 (1951).

5. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: New American Library, 1953).

6. James S. Dusenberry, Income, Savings and the Theory of Consumer Demand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967).

7. Lloyd Fallers, "A Note on the Trickle Effect", Public Opinion Quarterly 18, 314-321 (1954). Reprinted in Class, Status and Power, R. Bendix and S.M. Lipset, eds. (London: Routledge, 1966).

8. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Great Painters, Architects and Sculptors (London: Everyman's Library, 1963).

9. Goffman [4]. 10. Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture andHigh

Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 11. Venturi's Guild House was illustrated in

his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966). At the same time that the ideas in the book were the subject of intense interest in the international architectural community and especially among students, Venturi's oeuvre of completed buildings was otherwise meagre.

12. My role in this project was that of 'decorative artist', at that time considered almost a term of abuse. The architect was Theo Crosby of Pentagram Design, one of the founding members of Art and Architecture, to whom this paper is dedicated.




No. 1. Top left. Stephen s'Soreff, illustration for forthcoming issue of Avant Garde Art Review, offset print, 82 x 11 in. Caption will read "April 1993-Technicians check progress of genetically engineered

monumental sculpture for Jefferson County Courthouse."

No. 2. Top right. D. Hoffman, W. Meeks III, J.T. Hoffman; computer rendering of a completely embedded minimal surface of finite topology, based on the equations of C. Costa, 1985. See Michele Emmer, "Soap Bubbles in Art and Science". (Photo copyright ? 1985 Hoffman, Meeks, Hoffman.

Reprinted by permission.)

No. 3. Bottom left. Otto Piene's Berlin Star(dacron sailcloth, 48ft diameter) reflected in Shawn Brixey and Laura Knott's Photon Voice mirror, 1986. (Photo: David Atherton) See Elizabeth Goldring,

"Desert Sun/Desert Moon'.

No. 4. Bottom right. Decoration: Peter Lloyd Jones. Architect: Theo Crosby. General view of the facade of Ulster Terrace, showing the effect of the consistent use of architectural decoration.
























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